The plan was to climb Snowdon and then head down to Llanberis by the Meol Elio ridge. But I didn’t want to climb up by the rather tedious Llanberis path. So I parked in Llanberis and jumped on a bus to the car park at Pen y Pas. Facing the hill here the Miners’ Track is the one on the left, the Pyg Track the one on the right. The Pyg was for me today. It’s really a delightful way up, straightfoward enough but with just enough clambering around – it can hardly be called scrambling – to keep it fun. Some guidebooks characterise the zigzags at the top as some kind of purgatorial horror but I couldn’t for the life of me see why. I got to the top in thick cloud for the third time in a row. I don’t object to having a café on top of a mountain but it would be nice if it was a nicer café. I was hungry enough to eat one of their not very delicious pies.
I wanted the Snowdon Ranger path down which was easy enough to find, everything here being rather well signposted. You just turn left and cross the railway just after the trun off back to Minerts’/Pyg at the top of the zigzags. You go down Snowdon Ranger until Llyn Ffynnon -y– gwas appears on your left and the ridge of Moel Cynghorion looms up on your right. To get to this point you seem to descend an alarming long way but of course you are going from a 1085m summit to a 674m summit which is a long way down and the climb back up to Moel Cynghorion is not so very long. From here it’s just a matter of following a path along a lovely up and down easy ridge all the way to the top of Moel Elio with its huge wind shelter. From here I followed the NE ridge down. There’s a bit of a path and stiles where they’re needed. Eventually, after a short section where my path rather gave up on me, I got to a road which I followed, for still a fair old distance, back to Llanberis. The burgers in Pete’s Eats are nice.
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